Hugo's Charted Course `Fooled' The Forecasters

September 23, 1989|By MATHEW PAUST Staff Writer

If it's raining when you read this, don't blame Hugo.

Hurricane or otherwise, Hugo's gone.

A clash between a cold front from the northwest and a low-pressure system from the Gulf of Mexico is causing the drenching expected throughout today, Dewey Walston, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service's Norfolk office, said Friday.

The cold front, carrying frigid polar air to the coast, should force temperatures down to where highs on Sunday will stay below 70.

"There might even be snow flurries in the Virginia Mountains," said Watson.

The mountains, where folks were bracing for expected flooding from as much as a foot of rainfall, escaped relatively dry Friday, as the fringes of Hugo dropped less than half that amount - ranging from 3 to 5 inches.

Wind gusts reached as high as 80 mph in some western parts of the state Friday, Walston siad, but there were no reports of flooding.

"I don't know whether to laugh or cry," Patrick J. Michaels, state climatologist, said on Friday, referring to Hugo's defiance of the country's "best" forecasters at the National Hurricane Center in Coral Gables, Fla.

"Most of the forecast wisdom," even Thursday night, predicted that Hugo wouldn't hit land until early Friday," he said.

But the powerful hurricane pulled a quickie, landing several hours early, at midnight.

"All of a sudden it just flew into Charleston," said Michaels, a professor of environmental science at the University of Virginia.

Robert Molleda, a Hurricane Center spokesman, attributed the storm's sudden break for land to "upper air patterns. The speed fooled us a little."

Molleda and Michaels agreed that Hugo's drastic deviance from the predicted path once it landed was because it outran the cold front moving in from the northeast. The cold front was supposed to have met the hurricane east of the Appalachian Mountains and bumped it northward.

Because the storm made it to the mountains before the front did, Hugo turned north about 100 miles further west than had been expected.

Once over the rugged mountain terrain, Hugo "tore itself to pieces," Michaels said.

He added, "The mountains got a few drips of rain, and there was a little more in the Shenandoah Valley. Somebody asked me if Southwest Virginia took the brunt, and I said it was more like a 'bruntette'.